Today Voat pushed an update meant to address three things: Vote manipulation, Archiving Data, and Feature Prep. I will keep this announcement as short as possible.

Vote Manipulation

I have been researching vote farming and brigading for about a month. And honestly, I’m pissed off. What I have found is simply unacceptable. These actions destroy Voat’s credibility and value and will be actively developed against. The following actions have been taken to increase vote integrity:

Archiving Data

Archived and Deleted Submissions, and their comments, can no longer be voted on.

Vote counts are using individual vote counts instead of the up/down totals on comments/submissions*

Users with High SCP/CCP should see an improvement accessing Voat when data isn’t in cache

* Please note that all point values will drop because of this new logic. Prior logic counted up/down totals on submissions and comments instead of the individual votes themselves (it was more performant this way). When a user deletes their account, their votes are removed but the up/down totals are not adjusted. Since new logic uses individual vote counts everyone’s points will be dropping unfortunately. Just heads up. @Atko was hit the worst of all, poor guy.

Future Feature Prep

Schema changes were made to prepare for the re-release of Sets (grouping of multiple subverses). Voat will begin set development next week as we have designed many upcoming features upon this basic structural concept including categorization, new user centric functionality (more info soon), expanded and more functional blocking capabilities, and the concept of “following” users who publish feeds (more info soon).

Naming conventions and indexing has been cleaned up in database.

Warning to Vote Brigadiers

I will shortly be banning hundreds of obvious alt accounts used to farm/brigade at Voat. While researching this problem, I noticed that no one is really innocent, meaning that we have both obvious farming/brigading going on but we also have this behavior from good solid users too. It is for this reason that I am not retroactively banning any accounts other than the obvious ones mentioned above.

From this point forward, if you brigade another users’ content your account will be banned.

Consider this fair warning that brigading and manipulating votes is no longer tolerated at Voat.